He could do nothing.
"I'll give you a chance," his enemy said as he rose to his feet. "You win five thousand for me and I'll let you keep the thousand and your life." He placed the knife in a sheath and drew a stubby revolver from a pocket. "If you make a wrong move, I'll blast you in half. I don't like to use this thing because it's noisy, but—" He waved the gun and the action seemed to complete the sentence in itself.
"Let's take a taxi," Farrell suggested as he rose shakily and brushed red sand from his clothes.
"No."
"It'll take an hour to walk there," Farrell protested mildly.
"We'll walk," the man stated. "We'll walk and we'll take the most deserted streets."
Farrell led the way through the small Martian city that bordered the spaceport and across a narrow stretch of desert to Dankor canal.
At the canal, he turned and followed it northward, walking on the huge, weather-smoothed stones that formed one wall of the large waterway.
Thousands of feet below them, muddy water gurgled roaringly as it moved southward to the Martian farmlands. In the clear atmosphere, the opposite wall of the canal ten miles away was a thin, dark line.